We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite implacability. But just recently a new claim is surfacing, very much not coming from her ‘people’, which is the hardest to swallow of all – that she is a fascist.
Of course, the boggle-eyed have said this about pretty much every Conservative leader – pretty much every Conservative – in living memory, but I’ve noticed in recent years how this silly slur has bubbled its way from up the student union bar and into the mainstream. The weekend just gone dished up three choice examples.
Newsreader Dan Walker reacted to a viral clip of Truss having a passing chuckle at the BBC during the hustings hosted by Alastair Stewart on GB News, by saying it was ‘dangerous’. In fact, not just dangerous but ‘incredibly dangerous. Dangerous for Liz Truss, for every viewer … for all of us’. If this is the troubled, head-shaking response Walker has to a weak joke, let us hope he never stumbles upon the work of the humorist Fozzie Bear, which would leave him permanently traumatised.
The Tories have been in power for 12 years to little discernible effect
Another ex-BBC hand Emily Maitlis joined in, comparing Truss to the villain played by Emma Thompson in the TV drama Years And Years, a character who instituted martial law and established concentration camps on British soil at the behest of a shadowy group of eschatological puppet-masters. Maitlis seems to have based this comparison on the fact that Truss is a woman with blond hair who has opinions, something you’d think she’d be more equivocal about. Four days later nobody has noticed that one of the country’s top political journalists has essentially compared the likely leader of the Conservative party to a dictator.
Someone had to go even further, and that someone had to be Jolyon Maugham QC. This preposterous egotist reacted to comments made by Truss and Sunak about curtailing the ability of vexatious litigants to gum up policy with spurious time and money wasting lawsuits by asking for cash to help him ‘resist the tide of fascism in the UK’. One suspects that for Jolyon ‘fascists’ means ‘people who disagree with Jolyon’.
The word fascism is thrown around so lightly. It is ascribed to people with utterly banal opinions. One can only wonder what those who’ve actually lived, or are living, under a dictatorship make of such witless, tasteless comparisons.
How do the people suggesting Truss is a fascist think a totalitarian regime operates? The clue is in the name – total, rigidly enforced military control of every part of the state. A part of me would like to see Liz Truss attempt that, purely for the lols.
It’s fascinating to see this nonsense becoming more common and now being spouted openly by bourgeois elites, permanently living in the Weimar Republic of their imaginations. A professional woman in her 50s recently wrote under a friend of mine’s Facebook status that she ‘doesn’t feel safe when Labour aren’t in power’.
For me, the worst thing about Tory governments is the deleterious effect they have on the creative industries, which take on a pompous and hectoring tone. Dramas are ‘prescient.’ Comedies are ‘important’ and ‘relevant’. Everything has to have some screamingly obvious political point. Sometimes it’s almost worth having Labour back in power just so they unclench. We might get something fun to watch on TV again.
For now, however, I’d like to ask Dan, Emily and Jolyon if they have seen the Tories? Because if they’re planning their thousand-year Reich they’re going a very funny way about it. The Nazis in Allo Allo were better organised. The Tories have been in power for 12 years to little discernible effect; in fact, under their half-arsed stewardship things in general have got more Blairish, with the vast organs of unaccountable power going entirely unchallenged. There’s plenty to criticise about the Conservative party and Liz Truss – but please, my loves, stop reaching immediately for the rubber truncheon.
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